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Saturday, June 19, 2010

Where Have All The Portfolios Gone

Now that my son is finishing 8th grade and heading to high school, I'm still waiting to get back all of his work hidden away in portfolios. They are educational black holes. Is some student work (good and bad) kept as examples without telling students? Do some teachers use the work in reports or their own class work without telling the kids? I know it won't do us much good now, but it would be nice to get the work back. I wrote to our school long ago about how hiding work in portfolios does not help parents and kids, but I never heard a word back.

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My kitchen table was buried for two days with all the portfolio work that came home this week. It would have been nice to see some of it when it was still current. :( And now, there is so much of it from two kids, I just want to get through it as fast as I can.

OTOH, my fourth grader brought home testing reports for the past five years (starting in kindergarten). This was stuff I'd been asking for and been told didn't exist. Beautiful printouts of all the evaluations they had performed laid out chronologically. These reports might be new, but the data had to exist.

The scariest thing is that I found out only yesterday (at the end of 4th grade) that she was no where near grade level after 1st grade and had been deemed "at risk."

But over that summer, she made huge leaps and started 2nd grade way ahead. They never told me, until the end of 4th grade.

"The scariest thing is that I found out only yesterday (at the end of 4th grade) that she was no where near grade level after 1st grade and had been deemed 'at risk.'"

Wow!

I heard indirectly about a number of tests over the years where the schools never told us that they happened or sent home the results. There was also the time in fifth grade when my son qualified to take the Johns Hopkins CTY test and the school deliberately didn't tell us. When I eventually asked the head of school, he said that he didn't like the courses very much. What he didn't like was to have to deal with any special learning arrangements. That was the private school he used to go to.

Parents don't know what goes on in class, there are few textbooks, no detailed syllabi, work and tests get hidden away in portfolios, report cards come home with vague and nonlinear rubrics, and the parent-teacher conferences (they used to have only 15 min. slots) have turned into having students write up deatiled reports about how THEY are supposed to become better students. Then we parents get open houses where they equate good state scores on getting most kids over a low cutoff with a quality education. On top of that, they will use my son as an example of how well many kids do.